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Cisco XDR vs Rapid7 InsightIDR comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Net...
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Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (4th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (5th), Ransomware Protection (2nd), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (1st)
Cisco XDR
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rapid7 InsightIDR
Ranking in Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
19th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (24th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (11th), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (34th), Threat Deception Platforms (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) category, the mindshare of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is 4.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco XDR is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 InsightIDR is 2.2%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks4.5%
Cisco XDR1.5%
Rapid7 InsightIDR2.2%
Other91.8%
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
 

Featured Reviews

ABHISHEK_SINGH - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Process Expert at A.P. Moller - Maersk
Gained full visibility and streamlined threat detection through behavior-based insights and AI integration
Initially, we got to have a lot of false positives when we onboarded, but nowadays it's quite smooth. We have fine-tuned our security policies and allowed different levels of policies to get rid of those false positives. Currently, we are getting a fairly good amount of incidents that are not false positives or benign, but actionable items. The process is streamlined. In the initial days, the operations used to get involved in a lot of benign and other activities, but now the process is streamlined. We are leveraging the auto-detection and remediation plans. The operations teams are now more involved in other business roles as well, not just looking into the logs and fetching out what's happening there. They have fixed a lot of things. Initially, they didn't have IAC code drift detection, cloud posture management, or security posture management, but they have those now. They purchased different vendors and did a merger with that. They have now Prisma Cloud that gets integrated and now they are working with Cortex Cloud. Everything that was negative has now been addressed, and the product altogether looks to be in a very better and mature shape now. Currently, it's more or less detecting the workloads with AI-based best practices. Since most organizations are consuming AI agents and other things, we are looking forward to seeing what other feature enhancements Palo Alto can support in that.
Fred Parks - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Consultant at W.C. Bradley Co.
Centralized visibility has transformed incident investigations and now cuts response time dramatically
Workflows could definitely be easier to work with. Workflows are automated tasks that can be kicked off inside of a playbook. When someone is responding to something, they can click a button and it will perform automated tasks for them inside of these other products. The product can actually control the behavior of a firewall and you can write a rule in a firewall from Cisco XDR without having to go into the firewall software. However, if it is not a native workflow automation, it is very difficult to create your own. It is not intuitive and you almost have to be a developer and get really good with the API. This could definitely be improved on, particularly the custom workflow automation. Another thing that could be improved is Cisco documenting how it makes decisions, because there are certain factors or criteria that it uses from the source products. Cisco XDR gets all of its data from the integrations, so if you do not integrate anything, it is not going to do anything. Sometimes in these integration products, such as Secure Network Analytics or Cisco Security Exposure, they could be generating some type of alert and you do not necessarily see that in Cisco XDR. This is because it knows, maybe because of these other products, it is not really a big deal and is not big enough to raise an incident. However, I do not think Cisco does a great job in explaining what those rules are, such as why this happens and how this happens. This can cause some questions and some concern. I think it is doing the right thing, but I think it would be better if they had a rule set to say, based on this data, this is how the product actually works.
Prajwal Chougale - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Centralized threat hunting has improved alert accuracy and simplifies incident investigations
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or monthly lacks detailed information about how logs are being ingested. While the details are there, they could be more concise and easier to understand for any level of authority. The second area is alert tuning; compared to Microsoft Sentinel, Rapid7 InsightIDR provides fewer alerts with more static alert functionality and lacks dynamic alerting exposures. There could be improvements to learn from past alert activities for more dynamic alert configurations. These two areas are the main areas for improvement; everything else is good.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is specifically designed to prevent zero-day attacks and is part of an ecosystem of Palo Alto, providing customers with a long-term vision to modify and redesign how security is applied in their company."
"The solution is a new generation XDR that has a lot of artificial intelligence modules."
"I have found the solution to be very easy in respect of the integration and configurable."
"The anti-exploit is impenetrable. We chose Traps because it is the only product that we were not able to get anything past."
"The initial setup isn't too bad."
"The solution allows us to gain remote access without the user's knowledge and take the necessary actions on the device."
"The integrations are out-of-the-box, as are the playbooks."
"The protection offered by this product is good, as is the endpoint reporting."
"Cisco XDR has positively impacted our organization by providing faster detection of complex threats, reducing alert fatigue, and giving us better visibility."
"The feature I appreciate the most about Cisco XDR is the flexibility for a user to be able to create their own reporting and dashboards, ingest all the analytics, and make it something meaningful to their business to actually get real, purposeful information out of just a swamp of data."
"The features of Cisco XDR benefit my company since time is money. When outages happen and when a customer can't reach the internet, they get agitated. Therefore, the quicker we can mitigate an issue, our customers get happier in a quicker fashion."
"One of my favorite features of Cisco XDR is the automation tool, which saves a lot of time because we can craft these automations and workflows."
"In just four months, I have seen a good return on investment with Cisco XDR, as I have reduced incidents and saved time because previously, if I encountered any incident, I would have spent considerably more time and effort reaching out to every security control on my network and checking logs across multiple systems."
"Since implementing Cisco XDR, our organization has improved its incident response process and overall SOC visibility."
"Technical support from Cisco is good and very helpful."
"My advice for other organizations considering Cisco XDR is that it offers proactive security measures that are really very helpful."
"Log search allows us to dive deep into aggregated logs and query all event types at once.​"
"If you were on other solutions, you would notice that they use agents from third-party, from open-source, from a native OS, or from other tools. Here, however, it is an agent from Rapid7 itself. This adds to the solution's overall capabilities."
"InsightIDR helps us investigate an environment to discover information about incidents."
"Simple configuration and automatically syncs to the cloud platform."
"Rapid7 is easy to use and deploy. It is a simple solution and has easy data pulling."
"Very intuitive and easy to set up."
"This is a great product and the team is very willing to work with companies."
"Another very important part of insightIDR is the ability to collect data from endpoint devices via agent software. With a large remote workforce, this allows visibility into the endpoints that are connected to the internet, but not to the corporate network."
 

Cons

"Whenever the tool releases a new version when deploying the product across the organization, I feel like there are some disturbances in the CPU usage after upgrading the tool to the latest version."
"It is not very strong in terms of endpoint management. It should have additional features like DLP, encryption, or advanced device control. Currently, Cortex is good in terms of the security of the endpoints, but it is not as good as other vendors in terms of the management of the endpoint."
"Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR does not detect malicious activity like in other anti-virus solutions like Trend Micro and Windows with Cisco."
"The tool needs to be improved in terms of integration and interface."
"There are some third-party solutions that are difficult to integrate with, which is something that can be improved."
"The solution needs better reports. I think they should let the customer go in and customize the reports."
"I think sometimes Cortex XDR agent automatically stops event capturing from the device, and then even the dashboard does not get any notifications from the agent."
"They have the worst support, as a company, that I have ever worked with, as they are difficult to get a hold of and keep on the phone. They don't know what they are talking about when you get them on the phone. They don't like to respond to messages when you send them to them. They like to "research problems" for weeks on end, then pass you off to somebody else."
"The licensing of Cisco XDR is a bit complicated. The cost can depend on what it is, and the process can be a little complicated."
"I believe the false positive reports can be reduced through AI automation, as well as the duration while loading the software."
"Improvements in Cisco XDR revolve around performance."
"When we first started with Cisco XDR in August, everybody was having issues. There were three people in our organization, including me, who couldn't even log in to Cisco XDR."
"I could not choose Cisco XDR a perfect score mainly because there is still room for improvement in usability and customization."
"My only complaint about Cisco XDR is related to licensing, which is complicated."
"Cisco XDR can be improved by addressing the upfront cost. Everything matters for us since we're small, mom and pop, so every dollar counts."
"While Cisco XDR is robust, it could benefit from improvements on the AI side."
"The solution needs improvement in threat intelligence. Increasing the depth of intelligence to help users understand more about threats is a possibility. My suggestion is to expand access to other websites or resources."
"I would like to see more development in InsightIDR towards building their SIEM solution and converting it to XDR."
"I'd like to see a mobile application included and some feature related to the generality of segregation for internal users that access the application."
"I'd like to be able to get the compliance report within the solution which is currently not possible."
"Inability to get access to compliance reports within the solution."
"It takes time for the product's support team to resolve issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"It would be useful to import threat intelligence in YARA format along with known incorrect email addresses.​"
"They should add more configuration and security features to it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If one wishes to work with another team or large number of users at a future point, he must purchase a license for them."
"The price was fine."
"It has a higher cost than other solutions, like CrowdStrike or Microsoft’s EDR tools, but it reduces the cost of our operations because it’s a new generation antivirus tool."
"Very costly product."
"It's way too expensive, but security is expensive. You pay for your licensing, and then you pay for someone to monitor the stuff."
"I am using the Community edition."
"We didn't have to pay any additional fee for the cloud instance. It just came with the renewal, which was nice."
"The pricing is okay, although direct support can be expensive."
"The licensing of Cisco XDR is a bit complicated. The cost can depend on what it is, and the process can be a little complicated."
"The pricing is good, and it is not very expensive."
"The pricing and licensing are competitive."
"The solution has a mid-range price point in the market"
"Rapid7 InsightIDR is priced very well and is cost-effective."
"Licensing is by endpoint and amount of retention time (at least ours is). Default retention was one year, but we are able to push the retention further if needed. There's also a provide-your-own-S3 option for longer retention if you don't want to pay for the additional retention years in your Rapid7 agreement."
"The team is very willing to work with companies. My suggestion is to call the Rapid7 sales department and see how they can help.​"
"It is more reasonably priced than other vendors."
"I rate Rapid7 InsightIDR's price a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
21%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. Sentinel One
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. ...
Comparing CrowdStrike Falcon to Cortex XDR (Palo Alto)
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. CrowdStrike Falcon Both Cortex XDR and Crowd Strike Falcon offer cloud-based solutions th...
How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface,...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco XDR?
The centralized visibility, automation, and reduction in investigation time have provided good operational value for ...
What needs improvement with Cisco XDR?
Cisco XDR could improve the UI customization experience. Some workflows still feel more complex than they need to be,...
What is your primary use case for Cisco XDR?
We mainly use Cisco XDR for centralized threat detection and incident investigation, especially for correlating endpo...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 InsightIDR?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been very positive; it is cost-effective and offers great ...
What needs improvement with Rapid7 InsightIDR?
I would say there are two areas for improvement: the reporting dashboard that provides insights or reports weekly or ...
 

Also Known As

Cyvera, Cortex XDR, Palo Alto Networks Traps
No data available
InsightIDR
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CBI Health Group, University Honda, VakifBank
Information Not Available
Liberty Wines, Pioneer Telephone, Visier
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco XDR vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.